Category Archives: Software

The easiest way for anybody to get started with building a smart home is through the lights. They’re the easiest to setup and some don’t even need a hub — just the bulbs, a decent Wi-Fi connection, and your smartphone.

To take your lighting a little further, you can turn to IFTTT (If This, Then That) for no-sweat integration. You can set schedules, dim the lights automatically, and switch them on a couple of minutes before you get home. Here are 3 totally lit smart bulbs that have ready-to-use IFTTT recipes for you to use.

Philips Hue

We’re starting with the most popular bulbs, the Hue. The IFTTT recipes for Hue include turning the lights on/off at certain times, during sunsets or when you get home; switching the colors to blue when it rains outside; making the colors loop when you feel like it, and dimming down the lights.

WeMo Lights

You can find practical recipes on IFTTT for WeMo like switching the bulbs on and off when you get home or when it’s raining outside or track the bulb’s energy usage in your Google Drive. But there are fun uses too! You can make the bulb dim a little bit when you get an email from your SO or get notified of your favorite football team’s score with your WeMo bulbs.

LIFX Bulbs

LIFX probably has the most number of available IFTTT recipes online and they range from practical to smart-home interactive to the unnecessary, but charming.

As expected, there are recipes that turn on the lights on/off when you arrive/leave, fade the lights so you wake up gently in the morning, and flash the lights when your doorbell rings. Then, there are fun recipes which make the bulbs blink when you’re mentioned on Twitter or Facebook. Or recipes that make the bulb flash your team’s colors everytime they score!

You can get any of these bulbs, but in case you want the bulbs with the most number of available IFTTT integrations (the LIFX bulbs), you can get one at a $15 discount with the code LIFX15.

Non-Gmail accounts are getting an upgrade with the “Gmailify”application. Get the full features of Google email without the need of a Gmail account. Now, you have the option of keeping your old email address from another provider and receive the complete features of a Gmail account. When somebody enables Gmailify, they’re getting the benefits of a Gmail account without moving to the @gmail domain.

The Benefits of Gmailify:

Users get spam protection. The Gmail service identifies spam from patterns and user preferences. Spam gets sent to a separate folder and, at the top of the email, will be a label that explains why the message got sent to spam. Google filters the spam from your email.

Emails will be automatically sorted into tabs such as “social” and “update.” This is a default organizational tool that lets users get to the important stuff quickly and enjoy the fun stuff without pause.

Somewhat old news here, but you should know that Apple has removed all restrictions that prohibited making Video VoIP calls on 3G networks using the iPhone. The iPhone SDK has also been modified in order to give developers access to the Video VoIP APIs. This means you can use either iCall or Fring (which supports Skype) to make Video VoIP calls on your device and the only catch is that your carrier must allow VoIP calls to work on 3G in addition to WiFi (good luck). While stability of video is an issue with both these apps, it’s still a welcome move by Apple.

We talked earlier about pricing for Windows 7 now that its launch is getting closer. The OS will debut in October, which is only months away. Many are expecting great things out of Windows 7 and it better deliver where Vista failed.

Microsoft says that anyone who buys a Vista equipped PC starting on June 26 will be eligible for an upgrade to Windows 7 for free. The catch is that only certain versions of Vista are eligible for upgrade. That means if you buy a cheap computer running Vista Basic, you get no upgrade.

Last time I was in California for a conference, I spent a good hour trying to find an ATM to get some cash to eat lunch. I hate not being able to find an ATM and even in my hometown at times, it can be hard to find a place to grab some cash.

MasterCard has announced a new application for the iPhone and iPod touch called ATM Hunter that will find ATMs near you. The application uses the location functionality of the devices to pinpoint ATMs nearby.

If this fantastic bit of software works as advertised, getting your stolen gadgets back from the miscreants who took them will become just a little bit easier. iHound Software is a free download that, once properly configured on your device, will automatically contact you as soon as it’s plugged into another computer via USB. You’ll get an email with the IP address of the computer it’s being used on, and it will even print out a dandy report which you can then bring to a police station. Hopefully you can then get your ISP to cooperate, and help locate the twit who thought it cool to swipe your iPod.

The software works on a variety of devices (list here), and is able to track up to three devices. The company plans on keeping this free, though they may release a Pro version in the future.

Even though the RoboDevelopment Conference was primarily about, well, robots, there was a lot of potential crossover technology that has huge applications for consumer electronics. One of the most impressive of these that I saw was the ViPR pattern recognition technology, under development by Evolution Robotics. ViPR uses a camera (like the one you probably have in your cellphone) to look for distinctive patterns in an image. For example, a piece of text would be a distinctive pattern of pixels that the software could then translate into a meaningful letter. But the technology goes way beyond that: whenever you see something, your brain is recognizing a distinctive pattern of light and saying “hey, that’s a tree!” or “hey, I’m in my living room!” Your brain can do this even if it’s seeing only a piece of an object, or seeing a place from a different perspective. ViPR is capable of making the same sort of inferences. It works with >80% accuracy at recognizing objects or places, even when it’s dark or when it has to deal with distortion. It can identify an object when up to 90% of the object isn’t visible. Basically, this lets electronics “see” in a meaningful manner, much in the same way that we do.

Applications for the ViPR system are everywhere. The military is using it to look for guys holding RPGs, since an RPG has a distinctive visual pattern that ViPR can identify, even if the RPG is being held at an angle and partially concealed at a distance in low light. Current commercial uses (in Europe, mostly) include ViPR acting as a tour guide on your cellphone: take a picture of a landmark, and your cellphone will recognize it and provide information. What I’d personally like to see is the integration of ViPR with Google Street View to provide a highly accurate urban pseudo-GPS system. All you would do would be to take a picture of where you were, the ViPR system would query Google’s Street View database and find a matching pattern, and you’d get your location back. Easy, right? Well, they’re working on it… They just need to get some major companies (cough Google cough) actively interested.

Like it or not, most of the time when you take a picture, a significant portion of the image is (for lack of a better word) useless. Or rather, there are lots of areas of the image that aren’t conveying any important information. Obviously this excludes you artsy-picture types, but if you’re just trying to show and/or explain something (which most of the images on the Internet, excluding porn, are probably trying to do) wouldn’t it be useful if you could make images smaller by selectively removing the least important pixels? Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed some software to automatically do just that, in realtime no less. Watch and be amazed:

So it’s obviously still a work in progress, but it’s already pretty clever and seems to have a working automated mode as well as a decent user interface. What with the population of itty bitty mobile devices capable of Internet browsing exploding like a rabbit warren underneath a Viagra factory, a little piece of software that can work behind the scenes to dynamically re-size images (in the same way that HTML dynamically re-sizes) could have a huge range of applications.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.